Big “noise rock-adjacent” music fan here ! Most well good bands have already appeared in this thread it seems so i’ll share with you some of the most amazing french underground band in the style:
Hint, especialy this album but everything is good:
DOPPLeR, almost never heard of this band until I talk with my upstair neigbour when I lived in Lyon, who happened to be the guitarist and woked on his solo album, needed some drone recorded, so I went in his little studio with a Moog and had fun for a couple of hours. He ended up giving me the full discography of his band in CD, this one is probably the best:
Picore ! Perfect mixture of trip hop weirdness with noise rock / shoegaze guitars (I happen to have a duo with the guitarist that i’ll link later on)
That’s my project with Picore guitar player, another EP and a full album incoming
Do you also know Ulan Bator? Amaury is an old friend and their live sets have been fantastic - his more drone / fuzz / gaze project I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral (which is such a great band name too ) is huge!
The swans drummer I saw in 3 bands I think. He was wicked. Best was Unsane. Helios Creed too I think? And that guy who was in the “Fingered” Kern movie with Lydia Lunch? Back when music was subversive as f$ck.
Comparing Swans and Sunn O)))) shows in the same venue (on different dates), both were loud, no question.
But it was after the Sun O))) show that my friends and I were asking each other “hey did your chest stop vibrating from the show yet?”. Kept going well into the day after the show. Wondered if I was going to have a heart attack, and if so, why was it taking so long…
For us the Sunn O))) show was like 90 min. of sonic jacuzzi - this near constant massage of one’s internal organs by sound waves. Very different experience than Swans or Mogwai (the year they ended every show with delay pedals cranked to max feedback).
The sound hit our guts - literally - more than our ear drums
maybe its cos i had seen multiple very loud doom bands at that point - most not as loud and none as extreme as sunn o, but plenty loud so the sunn o gig felt like more of the same. jucifer was as loud as sunn o for example. swans was unpredictable, as loud but scary and they used volume unlike any other band i’ve seen.
I saw Jucifer, Sleep, and other loud bands at Psycho Las Vegas 2016. Great shows, loud AF, no crazy vibrating sensation in the torso the next morning.
When I talk about the Sunn O))) show, I’m talking about waking up the next morning with my body vibrating like crazy, because of the sound vibrations - into the organs inside your torso, never mind about the ears - from the previous night. That never happened to me before, or since. Everyone I talked to who was at that show reported the same thing. This has nothing to do with liking the music or not liking it - it’s this freaky, involuntary sensation that wouldn’t stop.
Only band who messed with me physically was the Melvins, Melvins, Melvins at First Ave in Mpls. They opened for themselves twice… I actually think they purposely added low freq sound to shake your bowels.
I kinda know the feeling, Sunn 0))) was extremely intense and I always fall into the same sort of repetitive movement trance (imagine subtle headbanging in slow motion) at slow doom shows, but I’m not sure how to describe them musically - Kannon is like post-black metal or something. Love that album. I’d of preferred to see the sinking belle shows with Boris. One of my fave albums, and a unique live experience
When I saw My Bloody Valentine I could feel the soundwaves hitting my ribs/heart and stomach and I got that feel like when your on a rollercoaster or driving real fast over and down hill. I knew what songs they where playing by the feel of the music more than the sound as I was half deaf during and after the show for about a week. I remember a ton of people leaving during the 20 min holocaust section, but it made me experience synethesia, I was seeing sound as colour and so on. It was the most intense live thing I’ve ever seen, as it was at the roundhouse in London which is a fucking great venue and about a few orders of magnitude bigger than any noise gig would ever be. It was unreal, beautiful, scary everything I love them for and more.
I’ve seen swans twice at the same smallish venue (the concord on Brighton sea front) which was excellent, loud and aggressive, so much so that my gf and our other friend had to leave the first time. But it didn’t find it to be as intense and they’d matured so much musically that it was just fascinating to watch. I saw Loop play there a week or two after and that was better IMO. I was blown away by how they used feedback, psychedelic as fuck but not necessarily a good trip.
We were probably at the same gig (there might have been more than one, I suppose. I forget). I saw them two days in a row on the Rollercoaster tour at Brixton Academy alongside Jesus and Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr (both great ; J&MC had a percussive moment during one song that sounded as intense as Neubauten) and the 20-minute MBV noise sections were the highlight of each night’s ear-blistering.
Caroliner Rainbow back in about ‘04ish at a warehouse in San Francisco. Part of the Brutal Sound Effects series.
They spent three days setting up their stage area (which was huge). Every surface, floor, ceiling, walls, was covered in amorphous day glow tendrils and all had equally abstract matching costumes that made them blend in like camouflage. They had convulsing animatronic fake band members in addition to their already large band. They strung up so many black lights that we had to pull power for them from all over the building. Then they built a huge false wall in front of it all.
The band who played before them played in almost total darkness and was a “serious” noise set. As soon as Caroliner started they ripped the wall to pieces and the black light was blindingly intense. You couldn’t make sense of what was happening on stage or who was real and who was a prop/ scenery. The music was like if the Residents and Merzbow formed a nightmare acid trip country band.
Great show.
Yeah I went to the first night I think it was the Friday show. I would of loved to of been on the rollercoaster tour, I love JAMC I had tickets to see them play darklands in Manchester in 2020 but it’s just been put off. I saw them play psychocandy a couple of years back, and it was incredible. Barbed wire kisses is also some album, great cover of can - mushroom
I saw slowdive play there in 2014 before they’d written any new stuff really so it was almost their entire discography, including their slowdive ep. Which is probably my fave, along with their golden hair (syd barret) cover.
Haha supported both the Telescopes and Daisy Chainsaw in my dodgy early 1990s days. Which were brought back to me today when I noticed that Loop seem to have reformed (again) and put out a new LP which is rather fantastic (in the way that most bands doing it again 30 years later simply aren’t). Sticking it on the stereo, turn up the volume and its like the last three decades simply hadn’t happened.
There’s this small festival in Switzerland where all kinds of experimental rock bands play. In 2009, I saw Lightning Bolt, Mogwai, Sonic Youth and Sunn O))) there in one weekend. In 2007, The Young Gods, Fennesz & Mike Patton, Isis, Nomeansno and Celtic Frost played there. That’s also where I saw The Swans for the first time.
